


Caged Lightning

by Sholio



Category: Street Justice (TV)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Magic, Alternate Universe - Urban Fantasy, Character Study, Friendship, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-12-15
Updated: 2017-12-15
Packaged: 2019-02-15 02:25:04
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,881
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13021272
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Sholio/pseuds/Sholio
Summary: Adam's never seen anyone use magic like Grady does. He's never seen anyonefightlike Grady does either.





	Caged Lightning

**Author's Note:**

  * For [zortified (james)](https://archiveofourown.org/users/james/gifts).



> I absolutely loved your prompt about a Street Justice magical AU. Thank you for the idea!

Adam's never seen anyone use magic like Grady does. He's never seen anyone _fight_ like Grady does. It's a dance of fire that is at once balletic and incredibly powerful, sparks dancing on Grady's fingertips and hair, throwing half-built, home-brewed spells he comes up with on the _fly_ (who does that?), flinging raw energy when the spells run out.

About the closest Adam can think of is the way fae sling magic around, the pure burning energy of it. But humans don't work the way fae do; they don't have the same deep energy well to draw from. Even Miguel, half-fae changeling that he is, handles his own magic more carefully than Grady. Miguel is capable of incredible bursts of raw power -- Adam's seen it, knows Miguel can throw around energy that'd blow any human practitioner right out of their boots. But unless he's pushed into a corner, Miguel holds it in check, preferring to use human weapons -- knives and fists and guns -- though Adam also knows the kid slips glamour on and off as naturally as breathing.

("You ever glam me or anyone in this place again, I'll kick you out of here and you won't come back," he told Miguel at the bar one night. An ordinary human wouldn't have noticed, but practitioners are sensitive to the ebb and flow of energy nearby. Miguel just laughed and let his human face slip for a minute, turning toward Adam, a quick flash of slitted cat-pupils and a glimmer of electric purple hair too fine to be human. And if he's ever done it in the bar again, Adam's never caught him at it.)

But Grady ... Grady's _not_ magic by nature, the way Miguel is. At least Adam doesn't think so. Grady's parents were almost aggressively non-magical, not rude or judgmental about it, but quietly yet firmly resistant to any magic outside the Church. It's not impossible one of them might have had long-ago fae ancestry -- some humans do; there's even a school of thought that most practitioners have a little fae in them somewhere, which doesn't really bother Adam but was a perpetual topic of late-night arguments during his time at the Academy. If there's any fae in Grady, though, it's the same eons-ago hint that might or might not have touched Adam and everyone he went through the Academy with.

No, Grady's human, but he burns energy with a raw abandon that often leaves him white and shaking after a fight, his personal energy so low Adam can barely feel it. And yet, Adam knows if _he_ tried the same trick (if he could even bring himself to do it, which he doubts; the Forms are too ingrained) he'd do more than exhaust himself. He'd die, at least if he tried to throw the same heavy-hitting spells that Grady can toss off. This is why control is hammered so hard into every Academy student, especially the ones training for a career in law enforcement or the military. This is why spells are prepared carefully over days, charged with meticulously-gathered energy that's ready to be unleashed all at once in a fight, with minimal danger to the wielder. Adam knows a few quick-cast spells, but it's all low-energy stuff, night vision and the like. And even being able to toss off those low-energy spells without having them prepared ahead of time is a matter of training and discipline. He practiced every one of those spells for months in order to be able to pull it together in seconds under pressure.

Grady just ... does it. He doesn't even _know_ most of the spells in the standard Western canon. For that matter, he's not coming out of any specific Eastern tradition that Adam's familiar with, either. What he does is pure Grady. It's like he can actually _see_ the shape of a spell before he builds it, like an artist starting with a blank canvas and turning it into a picture. Except in Grady's case, it's like he can decide what results he wants to get and just slap something together to get those results, even if it's ugly as hell, with energy spilling out all over the place and random magical side effects cascading out into the world. (They will not talk about the time magic runoff from one of Grady's spells turned Adam's shoes into a pair of salmon. They _definitely_ will not talk about the one that caused Malloy's hair to burst into purple flowers. It took Adam two days and a long-distance consultation with his former Academy advisor to get her back to normal.)

Any one of Grady's spells would have made any of Adam's old teachers break out in hives -- and with the sheer levels of energy the kid flings around, Adam thinks it's nothing short of a goddamn miracle that they haven't had to deal with worse side effects than salmon and flowers. It's bad enough, more than bad enough, when Grady blows up something he didn't intend to. Nobody's died, including Grady himself. Yet.

But he gets the job done. He always gets the job done.

Adam honestly can't figure out if the kid is a friggin' genius, or if anyone could do what he does if they weren't constrained by the Forms. Not just the ability to put spells together on the fly (Adam suspects that's a mix of natural talent and practice, like the way you can only get better at tactical combat decision-making through firsthand experience), but the ability to draw levels of energy that should be impossible according to everything he knows about magic. Maybe what stops most practitioners isn't innate human limitation, but training-induced blocks. Miguel seems to think so, but then -- half-human or not -- he's got nothing but contempt for what he calls "useless human rules," magical or otherwise. 

(Malloy claims she'd love to see Grady and Miguel really go toe-to-toe in a no-holds-barred sparring match sometime. The mere _idea_ gives Adam brand new gray hairs. If they ever do it, he's making sure it's not near buildings or people or animals ... or Malloy, for that matter. Middle of the desert might just about do it. Maybe one of those places that's already scarred and twisted from magical weapons testing back in the '40s and '50s.)

"I can hear you thinking over there," Malloy remarks, wiping down tables. "Not literally, of course."

"I know you don't eavesdrop." He knows how hard she's worked on it -- has known her long enough to remember her unruly teenage years. Her dad just had mild clairvoyance (not enough to save him, though, in the end) and a touch of telekinesis, but Malloy got the full psionic suite, poor kid. These days she wears the red earrings and torc that indicate she's passed Level 1 guild training, and she works with the force as a licensed psychic occasionally. Gone are the days when psychics had to hide in the shadows, but the days are also gone when they could legally pass as normal humans, and he's seen how people react to the torc when they notice it, the looks she gets. Being friends with a psychic takes a lot of trust. But then again, so does befriending a practitioner, or, God forbid, a fae.

Malloy merely raises an eyebrow at him. "I would ask what you're thinking so hard about, but that's your Grady look. No special mind-reading needed to figure _that_ out."

"I have a look?"

She nods and hands him a plastic tub of beer glasses. "And I'll tell you what I've already said a hundred times. Grady's not a child. He knows what he's doing, just the same as you do."

"But it's _not_ the same," he protests halfheartedly, knowing at the same time -- on the basis of past arguments -- that anyone who isn't a fellow practitioner can't possibly understand the visceral _wrongness_ of Grady being able to do what he does. "Look, imagine a psychic walking into the bar who's completely untrained, too powerful by half, uses their powers in ways that'd tie the Guild in knots if they knew about it --"

"You mean like Miguel does, with those glamours of his?"

Adam huffs out a laugh and decides to count it as a point scored. To him, it's completely different. Miguel's fae aura blazes in Adam's extrasense like a bonfire, sending questing tendrils out everywhere. Malloy is completely human. He can't even sense her doing what she does; no practitioner can. Whatever it is that psychics are doing, it operates on a completely different plane than magic.

But maybe to her, it's pretty close to the same thing. She can't sense or see Miguel working magic. To her, he ... well, he walks into the bar and he does something akin to what she can do, except entirely outside the bounds of Guild licensing, unrestrained by the rules she has to operate by ....

Okay. Fine. Malloy 1, Adam 0. This time.

"I told him not to use glamour in here," he remarks over his shoulder as he takes the tub into the kitchen.

"Yes, because telling Miguel what to do _always_ works!" she calls after him.

"He does what I tell him," Adam calls as he loads the dishwasher. Even without being able to see her, he can now literally hear the skeptical look she's sending him. "At least he does when I can convince him that I'll kick his ass if he doesn't."

There's laughter in her voice as she calls back, "Okay, _that_ I'll buy."

So, yeah, Grady's not the only wildcard in the hand Adam's been dealt. Though he's perhaps the most vexing one. Adam _expects_ fae to operate according to their own hard-to-understand rules. He doesn't expect it from a fellow practitioner. 

But Grady isn't just that. He's a natural wild talent who clawed his way through hell to get to where he is now, and if it left a clear stamp on him, he's turned out pretty good for all of that.

Not that Adam's going to stop trying to get him to learn control and maybe set up a _few_ spells beforehand, because damn it, does Grady even _know_ how much paperwork there is when a magical energy sideslip turns a parking meter into a six-foot eel?

But that trick he did last week with the kinetic energy punch was something that'd be damn handy to have in Adam's personal arsenal. He's not confident that he followed what Grady did when he threw together the spell, not enough to feel comfortable setting it up on his own -- he's built his own homebrew spells before, but always out of parts of other spells, never just from scratch the way Grady does as effortlessly as breathing. But maybe Grady could recreate it under controlled conditions, and clean it up a bit while he's at it. Maybe presenting it that way -- as a gift for Adam, not an attempt to force him to learn tighter control -- would go over better than trying to get him to engage in formal discipline exercises.

Learning's supposed to be a two-way street, after all, and they say it's a lifelong process. Maybe it's time for Grady to be the teacher for a change, and Adam the student.

For a little while.


End file.
